| We
drew a sigh of relief when the Cold War
ended and Communism and the Soviet
empire collapsed.
The Baltic and Eastern European
countries became free and many conflicts
around the world were resolved.
In the U.N. Security Council the
almost automatic veto disappeared and
with the decision in 1990 to intervene
against
Iraq
’s occupation of
Kuwait
the U.N. system for collective security
functioned as it was originally meant
to.
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President Bush spoke about ‘a new
international order.’
As Mikhail Gorbachev has recently written,
the 90’s were regrettably also a time when the political leaders missed
opportunities that were opened by the ending of the Cold War.
No peace was concluded.
The
US
became the world’s sole military superpower and this has increasingly
influenced the American foreign policy: in recent years the
US
has often acted as a ‘lone wolf’ rather than as the ‘lead wolf’ it was
during the Cold War.
The enormous military power has been seen
as a means to uphold a ‘Pax Americana’.
A passage in the
US
National Defense Strategy of 2005 declares that
:
“The end of the cold war and our capacity to influence global events open
the prospects for a new and peaceful system in the world.”
If this passage reflected self-confidence, the authors had, on the other
hand, a rather low opinion of the U.N., which together with terrorism, were seen
as obstacles to a realization of the world order contemplated:
“Our strength as a nation will continue to be challenged by those
who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes,
and terrorism.”
The sentences
quoted point to a will to uphold peace by military power rather than by
diplomacy and multilateral cooperation.
It is hard to
avoid the impression that – almost twenty years after the end of the Cold War
– military calculations still dominate the long-term thinking about major
global relations.
Terrorism is
formally made the chief enemy but precautions are taken against the growing
power of
China
and
Russia
.
The new
generation of nuclear weapons that is planned in the
US
cannot very well be designed for use against terrorists and the agreement
between the
US
and
India
on nuclear cooperation suggests a wish to create more counterweights to the
future
China
than
Australia
,
Japan
,
Taiwan
and
South Korea
.
It may well be
with the future
Russia
in mind that the
US
shows an ambition to expand NATO to comprise the
Ukraine
and
Georgia
(Senator Lugar wants to keep the door open also for Azerbedjan and
Kazakhstan
).
There is a
risk that these policies that are dominated by military thinking, if they
continue, may lead to conflicts which could have been avoided through a policy
aiming more at cooperation and less at alliances.
Mr. Putin’s
outburst in
Munich
recently may have been prompted by the American plans to place pieces of the
missile shield on Russian doorsteps, but
the Russian fuse has surely been burning with irritation for a long time.
Perhaps
China
’s shooting down of a satellite of her own was an outburst against American
military ambitions in space.
The International
Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction that I chaired argued in its
report (www.wmdcommission.org) that
after the Cold War there are no good reasons for the enormous nuclear arsenals
and that the nuclear weapon states, notably the US and Russia, should take the
lead in moving the world to disarmament.
A major
article (Wall Street Journal, 4 Jan. 2007) by
Mr. Kissinger and three other seasoned statesmen from the Cold War urging
nuclear disarmament may be a sign that the climate in the US is beginning to
change.
Perhaps it is
also a good sign that the very White Paper that explains why a new British
nuclear weapons program is needed is circulated with a letter from Foreign
Secretary Margaret Beckett, in which she says that
:
“We
stand by our unequivocal undertaking to accomplish the total elimination of
nuclear weapons and we will continue to press for multilateral negotiations
toward mutual, balanced and verifiable reductions in nuclear weapons.”
It would be
welcome if these words of commitment were followed by political action.
HansBlix@MaximsNews.com
~~~~~
MaximsNews.com, An Independent Voice from the
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